The cycle of metals between dust and gas plays a fundamental role in the chemical enrichment of the ISM. Metals are missing from the observable ISM gas phase because they are instead incorporated into dust grains, an effect called dust depletion. Characterizing the dust depletion of metals both in the local and distant Universe is important to investigate the evolution and origin of metals and dust through cosmic time. Dust depletion can be used to determine important dust properties, like the the dust-to-metal ratio (DTM) and the dust-to-gas ratio (DTG). These properties can give us clues about the production and destruction mechanisms of dust and how it evolves with metallicity and over cosmic time. I will present my recent results on characterizing the dust depletion of 18 metals using relative abundances in different galactic environments, including the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds and damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs) towards quasars (QSOs) and towards gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Our inferred dust depletion measurements are then used to estimate the DTM, DTG, the dust composition in terms of mass and the dust extinction in the ISM in these different galactic environments. Our estimates include all the elements that contribute to dust, a total of 29 metals and including C, which contributes significantly to dust but is hard to constrain. Our results have implications on the origin of cosmic dust and the dominant processes of dust production.
|
